La mayoría de análisis y políticas económicas en el área de América Latina se centran en enfoques macroeconómicos de naturaleza coyuntural. Frente a este enfoque de corto plazo, la literatura sobre crecimiento destaca el papel que la inversión en capital físico, la inversión en capital...

The literature on innovation has traditionally seen imitation processes as harmful to the development of new technologies, adverse for growth and detrimental to the welfare of consumers, producers and society at large. However, as we show in our paper, despite this widespread belief, imitation...

Though risk attitude is central to economics and finance, relatively little is known about how it is formed and how it changes over time. Based on US data from a dedicated psycho-social module on lifestyle of the 2010 Health and Retirement Study (HRS), we provide new evidence on the correlation...

We use a panel dataset from the Dutch Household Survey, covering annually the period 1993-2011, to analyze whether individual risk aversion changes over time with the background economic conditions. Considering six different measures of self-assessed risk aversion, which cover different aspects...

The following paper reports the main objective and the expected outcomes of an ambitious project that aims to develop a model for the analysis of both inter-household and intra-household distribution in a life-cycle perspective. In reporting such research objectives, this anal- ysis focuses in...

We use a large and unique administrative dataset from Italy, covering the period 2009-2014, to investigate opportunistic behavior (moral hazard) and the effectiveness of monitoring policies related to insurance against illness-related income losses. The analysis is based on the outcome of...

This discussion paper led to a publication in <A href="http://www.springerlink.com/index/J107501580204223.pdf">'De Economist'</A>, 159(3), 323-360.<p>We investigate numerically how indexation of funded pensions for inflation can be differ-entiated across the various groups of fund participants. The pension arrangement is modelledafter the Dutch situation. While the...</p></a>

The effect of intra-firm pay dispersion on work performance is controversial and the empirical evidence is mixed. High pay dispersion may act as an extra incentive for employees' effort or it may reduce motivation and team cohesiveness. These effects can also coexist and the prevalence of one...

We exploit the US Survey of Consumer Finances from 1998 to 2007 to study households’ portfolio risk bearing. We compare four alternative measures of risk, two based on a financial portfolio and two based on a broader portfolio also including – as illiquid assets – human capital, real...